Read Chapter 16: Aftermath: Trapped

The station’s main transmitter console glowed a sickly orange, half its lights dead, the other half blinking in erratic patterns that made no sense to anyone but the machine itself. Jack stood over it, hands on his hips, jaw tight. He’d already pried open the casing and traced three separate fried relays. The whole unit was toast.

“Can you fix it?” Elena asked from the doorway of the small comms room, her helmet tucked under her arm.

“Not this. Not without parts we don’t have.” He tapped the screen. “But there’s a backup antenna on the roof. Manual deployment. If I can get it up and pointed, it should piggyback off the satellite network. We’d have comms within the hour.”

“Then go.”

Jack turned, and she saw the way he favored his left leg, the slight hitch before he found his balance. The run to Relay 7 had done more damage than he let on. He caught her looking and straightened, defiant.

“I’ll need to run a survey of the roof first,” he said. “Check the structural integrity, make sure the mount’s still anchored after the blast wave.”

“That’s not your job.”

“Neither is fixing radios, but here we are.”

Elena shook her head. “The antenna mount is bolted to the roof. The roof sits on the ground. And the ground is my job. I can check the terrain, the load-bearing stability of the regolith beneath the station, and deploy the antenna in one pass. You stay here and monitor my vitals on the suit channel.”

Jack’s mouth opened, a protest forming, but she was already walking past him to the airlock.

“I’m not fragile,” she called back over her shoulder.

“I never said you were.”

“You didn’t have to.”

The airlock cycled with a tired hiss, the outer door grinding open to reveal a landscape that had changed entirely since they’d arrived. The explosion at the base had sent a shockwave rippling across the basin, churning the regolith into fresh furrows and scattering debris like a giant had tossed a handful of gravel. Relay 7 was on a small rise, its single dome squatting against the horizon like a turtle hiding from a storm.

Elena stepped out onto the surface, her boots crunching through the disturbed dust. The station’s roof sloped gently to her right, a metal platform accessible by a ladder that had partially collapsed. She’d have to climb.

“Elena, your oxygen’s at thirty-eight percent.” Jack’s voice crackled in her ear. “You’ve got twenty minutes before I pull you back in.”

“Understood.”

She moved toward the ladder, but a glint in the near distance stopped her. A flash of white—ice, exposed where the shockwave had sheared off a layer of regolith. She took two steps toward it, then three, and found the source: a new crater, fresh and raw, roughly twenty meters across. Its walls gleamed with a crystalline sheen.

Her geologist’s heart sped up.

She knelt at the crater’s edge, adjusting her helmet’s visor for a better view. The deposits ran in veins along the exposed stratum, thick and pure. Water ice. Not the trace amounts they’d cataloged at the poles, but a substantial reservoir, the kind that could sustain a permanent habitat for years. For a mission. For a colony.

“Elena,” Jack’s voice came again. “What are you doing?”

“Finding water.”

A beat of silence. Then, “We don’t have time to survey.”

“I’m not surveying. I’m observing. There’s a difference.”

But she knew he was right. Every minute she spent crouched here was a minute Jack’s leg was deteriorating inside, a minute the oxygen scrubbers were cycling air they couldn’t spare, a minute the trail Liang had laid was growing cold. She had a job to do. One job.

She forced herself to stand. The antenna deployment would take her near the crater’s edge anyway—the roof’s mount was aligned with the blast radius, ironically giving it the cleanest line of sight to the satellite network. She climbed the damaged ladder with careful precision, testing each rung before committing her weight.

The roof platform was small, barely three meters square, and the antenna mount sat at its center like a dormant flower. The dish itself was folded, its petals tucked in, waiting for a hand to open them. Elena unclipped the deployment crank and began to turn.

“How’s it going up there?” Jack asked.

“The mount’s intact,” she said, breath coming heavier now as the crank resisted. “Regolith’s stable. I’m making progress.”

She worked in silence after that, the crank turning slowly, the dish unfolding inch by inch. The crater was directly in her line of sight, and she kept catching glimpses of the ice, the way the low sun caught its edges and threw sparkles across the dust. It wasn’t just ice. It was a future. It was every child born on the Moon, every greenhouse that didn’t have to recycle every drop of water. It was a reason to stay.

And it was a reason she had to leave.

The dish locked into place with a satisfying click. Elena pulled the alignment lever, and the screen mounted on the mount’s base flickered to life, numbers scrolling as it searched for the satellite.

“Jack, the antenna’s deployed. You should have signal in the station.”

“Got it,” he said, his voice lighter now. “I’m seeing handshake… there. We’re online.”

She exhaled, then moved to start her descent. But her helmet’s proximity sensor chirped—a new signal, weak and low-frequency, coming from a direction that made her pause.

West-northwest. Fifteen degrees off the horizon. She checked the coordinates against her mental map of the base, the relay stations, the crater fields. Nothing was out there. Relay 7 was the farthest installed node in this sector. Beyond it, the terrain fell away into a shallow basin no one had surveyed in decades.

She adjusted the antenna’s receiver, just a few degrees, and the signal strengthened. It was a shape she recognized: a distress beacon, pulsing in a repeating pattern. Not standard. Altered. Almost… deliberate.

“Jack,” she said slowly. “I’m picking up a signal.”

“From the satellite?”

“No. From the ground. West-northwest of here. Roughly fifteen kilometers out.”

A pause filled with static. “That can’t be right. There’s nothing out there.”

“That’s what they said about the ice.”

She looked down at the crater once more, at the gleaming veins of frozen water. She could bring a sample back. She could analyze it, confirm its purity, file a claim on behalf of the research board. It would be her legacy. Her redemption.

But the signal was still pulsing, and somewhere out in the dust, Liang was waiting.

“I’m coming back in,” she said, and started down the ladder. Her feet had barely touched the ground when another glint caught her eye—not ice, but metal. A small tool, half-buried in the disturbed regolith near the crater’s lip. She bent to pick it up.

A multi-tool. Standard-issue, Mars Corps. Her breath stopped.

Engraved on the handle was a serial number. She knew it. She’d memorized it years ago, when it belonged to a man who wore it on his belt every day, who’d used it to pry open sample cases and loosen stubborn drill bits and fend off her complaints about mission logistics with easy laughter.

Marcus’s tool.

Liang had brought it here. He’d left it at the crater, knowing the shockwave would expose the ice, knowing she’d find it. He wasn’t just guiding her toward him. He was reminding her of what she’d lost. Of what she’d done.

Elena closed her fingers around the tool and slipped it into her suit’s utility pocket. Then she climbed back up the ladder to the antenna, realigned the dish toward the signal, and locked the coordinates into her helmet’s display.

She didn’t look back at the ice.

Inside the station, Jack was already standing at the main console, scrolling through the data stream the antenna had unlocked. He looked up as she cycled the airlock and pulled off her helmet.

“I’ve got a partial manifest from the base’s last transmission,” he said. “The explosion—it wasn’t isolated. There were secondary detonations. The main habitat’s integrity is compromised.”

“Survivors?”

He shook his head. “No signal. No response. It’s quiet.”

Elena set the multi-tool on the table between them. Jack looked at it, then at her. His face went pale.

“Where did you find that?”

“The same place Liang wants me to look.”

She planted the coordinates on the console, the pulsing dot glowing above the dead zone. “Fifteen kilometers west. There’s a signal. It could be Liang. It could be a trap. Either way, it’s the only thread we have left.”

Jack stared at the map for a long moment. Then he looked out the window at the crater and its glimmering ice.

“And the deposit?” he asked quietly.

“It’s real. It’s substantial. It could change everything for the program.” Elena’s voice was steady, but her hands were still trembling from the cold and the climb. “But right now, we have sixty percent life support left. One rover with a dead power cell. And no one else who knows we’re alive.”

She powered down the console and turned toward the storage locker where the station’s small tools and spare parts were kept.

“I’m going to fix the rover,” she said. “You’re going to study the signal. And then we’re going to decide what kind of mission this is going to be.”

Jack said nothing. But he didn’t argue, and that was enough.